


gold dust woman

by walksbyherself



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 13:52:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walksbyherself/pseuds/walksbyherself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the height of summer, the boy comes tripping into her property.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gold dust woman

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle XIV: Fiery Fourteen. The prompt words were: modern, genderswap, river, choices.

She lives alone and that’s how she likes it. The river borders her land on two sides; little better than a creek, but it’s a line and no one crosses it. The road makes up the third boundary, far enough away that most days she doesn’t so much as hear a car. She has three old hounds and a neighbor woman that sells off some of her produce to her so she never has to go into town. It’s like a kingdom of her own. It’s enough.

At the height of summer, the boy comes tripping into her property. She doesn’t see him at first, just hears the dogs baying through the open kitchen window. It’s not their joyful, hunting cry; it sounds like rage, so she puts on her hat and picks up her rifle.

The dry ground cracks under her boots as she follows the sound. She slips through the last stand of trees and sees the boy standing on a rock on the near bank of the river. The hounds have surrounded him, jaws snapping near his bare feet. He flinches, arms flailing, ready to fall.

“Dog!” she hollers, and three heads turn. One by one they trot over to her, standing clustered around her legs with tongues lolling.

“You named all of them ‘Dog’?” the boy stammers.

“I didn’t name them anything.”

The boy steps gingerly down from the rock and she takes her first proper look at him. His hair is bleached blond by the sun; his skin a rich tan that’s undercut by paler flashes from beneath his shirt cuffs. He has a man’s length of bone, a man’s jaw, but there’s still a little puppy fat clinging to his cheeks. Pleasing enough, if you’re looking to be pleased.

“Miss...It’s Miss Hedda, right?” the boy asks.

She nods. “You’re Dee’s boy, I suppose.” Her neighbor has mentioned having a son, bits of conversation dropped off with the preserves and the last tomatoes of the season. 

“Yes, ma’am. Percy, ma’am.”

“I was under the impression you were still a child.” Dee has never called him anything but ‘my baby’ or ‘my little boy.’ Hedda had pictured a toddler at best.

Percy’s mouth twists into something that is trying to be a smile. “Aren’t we all still children in our parent’s eyes?” he muses, trying for witty and coming out much too honest.

“I wouldn’t know,” she replies. “My brother emptied both barrels of a shotgun into my daddy when I was small, and my mamma wasn’t much help even before that.”

The boy’s jaw drops and Hedda remembers why she never attempts small talk.

“I don’t get many visitors,” she adds, as if that needed mentioning. “You want something to eat?”

“No, ma’am,” the boy stammers, “but I’d be grateful for a cool drink.”

She leads him back to the house and pours him a tall glass of lemonade. He drinks it in silence, sitting at her kitchen table, grass green eyes flicking over to where she’s leaning against the counter with a glass of her own. When he’s finished, he thanks her and leaves. The dogs don’t even lift their heads to watch him walk out the door.

Hedda figures she’ll never see him again.

 

When the boy shows up again the following week, Hedda reasons it’s hardly the first time she’s been wrong. The dogs see nothing to report, given that Hedda allowed him in before, so they don’t make a sound until he’s already on the front porch.

She answers the door in a faded sundress, her long dark hair falling out of its bun. Percy offers a shy smile. “I thought I might get another glass of that lemonade?” he says. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No,” Hedda blurts, then shakes herself before his expression can finish falling. “It’s not. Too much trouble, I mean.”

This time, she sits at the table with him. The boy makes idle conversation about the weather and Hedda manages to reply; it’s less awkward than before, but still confusing. When Hedda stands up to fetch the pitcher, she turns back halfway to the counter.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “And if you say one word about lemonade, boy, I’m getting my gun.”

Percy flushes, red crawling up his neck beneath his tan. “I...My mamma thinks I’m a child and treats me like one. It’s like she’s afraid to let me out into the world. My only friends are my cousins and I’m lucky to see them once a year. I don’t really _know_ anybody I’m not kin to and I thought...” He scrubs a hand through his hair. “Ma’am, I’m just really tired of being alone. It’s not a feeling I want to get used to and I’m afraid that I could.”

Hedda is quiet for a long moment. “Yeah,” she says at last, voice hoarse. “I understand that.”

 

The boy's visits become more frequent as the summer draws to a close. Sometimes he arrives with dirt still under his nails from working on the farm. Hedda doesn’t ask what he tells his mother about where he goes. She doesn’t particularly want to know.

Hedda makes batch after batch of lemonade and loans him books; most of her collection is so worn, the titles have faded from the spines. She has to pick them out for him. They talk long into the evenings about the books, about all the places he wants to go when he finally breaks away from the farm.

“I don’t know that I could leave,” Hedda confesses one night. “This is my land. I...” Her heart pounds at the thought. She reaches for her glass, a tremor running through her fingers.

Percy catches her hand in his. “I’ll go,” he says gently. “And then when I get back, I’ll tell you all about it.”

Hedda laughs, gives his hand a squeeze. “Alright, then.”

 

In the fall, she goes hunting. She’s still out when Percy comes for his visit, so he wanders further into her property to find her. By the time he reaches her, she’s nearly finished field dressing a deer. Percy takes one look at the carcass and promptly turns a little green. Hedda sighs and gestures with her knife to a clean patch of grass.

“Sit down before you fall down,” she says. “Put your head between your knees.”

Percy does as instructed; by the time he gets his breath back, Hedda is cleaning her knives.

“What are you gonna do with all that?” he asks, standing back up.

“Most of this I’ll freeze, a little I’ll cook today, but some is at its best fresh.” Her knife glides through the deer’s heart, carving it into thin slices like fruit. “Here,” she says, holding out a piece.

He bends down and eats it right out of her hand. She feels his lips brush her fingers and shivers. He chews, swallows hard. She watches his throat work and thinks about running her fingers down it. “It’s good,” he murmurs.

“Help me get this home,” she says.

When the deer is safely strung up in her shed and her knives put away, Hedda turns to thank him and falls silent. There’s blood left on his mouth from the deer heart, a flash of color on his still pale face. 

“What?” he asks.

Hedda lays her hands on his shoulders, drags one thumb in a heavy line along his collarbone. His eyes are wide, his breath short like that first day in summer, as if her hounds were at his heels again.

She bends down slowly. He doesn’t pull away when she kisses him, just parts his lips, maybe in shock, but Hedda presses the advantage. She coaxes his mouth further open, lets her tongue flicker inside when she hears him moan.

The boy tastes like spring.

 

Taking him into her bed shouldn’t be this easy. She should feel guilty or at least conflicted, but she feels only elated. He’s a man in the eyes of the law and he wants to be here; that’s good enough for her.

They keep kissing all the way into her house and up the stairs, shedding clothes behind them like leaves. When she has him naked before her, she puts her mouth on all the places where his farmer’s tan bleeds into fishbelly white; lips and teeth tracing the boundary. She feels him twitch under her palms, hears his breath stop, pushes him down onto the mattress.

They curl together on their sides; she lets his hands wander, lets someone else really touch her for the first time in years and years. She pulls him over on top of her, one leg curling high around his hip. Percy moans.

She reaches down to guide him into her, feels his cock twitch in her grasp and knows he won’t last long. She doesn’t care. They have plenty of time.

His arms tremble beside her face as he pushes inside. She turns her head, mouths at the tendons of his wrist as he settles. At the first roll of his hips, he collapses over her, shivering again.

“I _can’t_ ,” he half-snarls into the curve of her neck. “I’m gonna--”

“Then _do_ it, darling,” she purrs against his ear. “I want to see.”

A blush creeps over his neck and she wants to worry that skin with her teeth, but then she won’t be able to see his face. He thrusts twice more and then orgasm hits him like a knife to the back; she watches the shock and relief sweep over his face. She locks her ankles in the small of his back as he keeps trying to move inside her. She pushes the hair back from his face, kisses his forehead and cheek and mouth and his mouth and his mouth.

She frowns at the ache when he slides out, but laughs, back arching, when he keeps crawling down her body, pushing her legs further apart with his shoulders.

Outside the window, the first snow comes early.

 

The boy knows nothing of women, is insatiable in his curiosity. Hedda feels blessed to have such an eager student. 

He loves the taste of her, will eat her out for an hour at a time, but can never last when she gets her mouth on him. He likes her above him, her hands pressing down on his shoulders while his own dig bruises into her waist. They’ll kiss goodbye for half an hour at the door before slowly pulling apart; Percy trudging off into the chill night, Hedda watching him go.

She wanders her property while he’s gone, singing to herself, gathering pomegranates from gnarled trees before the frost takes them. They were the only thing she could ever get to grow here.

One night, Percy walks home still eating one and that’s how the trouble starts. 

 

Dee never exactly makes her displeasure known. She just stops making her deliveries.

Hedda has enough canned goods to last, if she’s careful, and more than enough meat. If she were a different person, she’d march over to Dee’s house and tell her that her son is a man grown who can spend his time how he likes. She’d tell her that she loves him. But she’s not that person, so she piles more quilts on the bed, builds up the fire. She is prepared for a long cold winter when the knock comes at her door.

Percy is standing there with snow caked up to his knees, clutching a duffle bag. “Would you mind some company, ma’am?”

She grabs him by the lapels of his coat and hauls him inside.

 

As spring gets closer, their fucking turns desperate. They end up on the floor as often as anything, banging scrapes and bruises into each other like lovers’ tokens.

“I won’t go home,” Percy gasps.

“Yes, you will. I’m not a goddamn thief, stealing people’s children.” Hedda winds her hand tight in his hair, bends his head back until she can sink her teeth into his throat. Percy cries out and she feels his hips twist. “Don’t you come yet,” she hisses against his skin. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he breathes. The words slide liquid hot down her spine. She grinds down onto him, teeth bared. He slips a hand between them, fingers so much more delicate against her than she wants, and she comes with a sob. He strokes his hands up and down her spine, soothing, slows the roll of his hips until she thinks he’ll never get off. He does, though, with a full-body shudder, his arms tightening around her until it hurts. It takes Hedda a long time to realize she’s crying.

Percy leaves for home the next morning.

 

Warm days come and Percy does not. Neither does Dee. Hedda chews on the last of winter’s deer jerky and considers her options.

It takes her three days to work up the nerve. She puts on the best dress she has left and polishes her boots. She picks out her hat with the broadest brim and sets off toward town. To her surprise, they still remember her there, or at least her family name. Apparently her brother has done quite well for himself; looks like he’s a shoo-in for governor. Hedda decides not to mention the shotgun. Instead, she says only that she lost touch with Zebulon some years back, but she’s pleased to hear how well he is. Do send her love if he should come around; in the meantime, might she get some help with her shopping?

The grocer drives her back out to her house in his truck; the back is full of her purchases, mostly food but with a few bags of new clothes and some kibble for the dogs. He helps her unload everything onto the porch; she dismisses his offer to help take things inside with a smile and the honest admission that she doesn’t know where it’s all going. In the end, organizing everything occupies the rest of the day and into the night. She falls into bed pleasantly worn out and sleeps without dreaming.

Hedda takes trips into town once a month to stock up on necessities. She has no interest in making friends, but she can be friendly and the people are friendly in return. She wonders if Dee has told them about how she spent last winter; if they do know, no one seems inclined to judge. They’re hardly hiding their sons everytime she walks into a room, and that’s good enough for Hedda.

The smell of Percy on her pillows and sheets fades to nothing.

 

Hedda is drinking her coffee, looking out the window at the frost on the trees, when the hounds take up a cry. They charge off toward the river, baying. Hedda drops her mug, leaving shattered porcelain on the kitchen floor as she runs after them.

She’s ten steps out the door before she realizes she isn’t wearing shoes, five more steps before she realizes she won’t turn back to get them.

She charges through trees, out of breath and limping. Percy is standing on the bank of the river, his duffle at his feet, the hounds swarming around him with wide doggy grins.

“My momma’s gone south for the winter,” he says, the corner of his mouth tugging up in a smile.

Hedda flips the tangle of her hair out of her face. “And she let you stay behind?”

“No, ma’am. I just told her I wasn’t going.” Percy’s smile widens. “That is, if you’ll have me?”

“You fool boy,” she says. “I will always have you.”

Percy laughs. She pushes her way through the hounds and shoves him down on the riverbank. He keeps laughing, right up until she settles astride his hips, and then he goes very, very still. Hedda digs her fingers into the cold earth beside his head.

“I will _always_ have you,” she whispers into his mouth.

He whispers back, “Yes, ma’am.”


End file.
